A good thing about using video to get a different perspective on your dryfire practice reps is that you will see things you didn’t before. Over the weekend I was working reloads (again), and noticed a flaw in my technique. Once I ejected the spent brass I was rotating the gun against my body so that I have a tactile reference of where the gun is. That part is fine, what wasn’t fine is that keeping the gun basically even with the bottom of my rib cage. The idea when reloading a revolver is to keep the gun vertical so that once the speedloader releases the rounds, gravity will get the rounds fully into the chambers. If a round gets hung up in the speedloader, or doesn’t quite seat all the way into the chamber, the cylinder cannot be closed and it slows everything down. By me holding the gun up as high as I was, I would have to cock my dominate hand wrist at an extreme angle when inserting the rounds into the cylinder with a speedloader. Occasionally, not realizing it, I would turn the gun off the vertical plane so that I could relax the angle in my dominant hand wrist. This would cause rounds to either hangup in the loader, or not quite fully seat into the chamber. Essentially a malfunction, although a user induced one. As I was thinking about how to fix the problem, I recalled something I heard Claude Werner say in one of his training DVD’s, that when reloading the revolver, the
butt of the gun should be brought to the naval after the brass has been ejected from the cylinder. By lowering where I stage the revolver it relaxes the angle in the wrist and mitigates the tendency to turn the gun off vertical when reloading. I have started making an effort to lower the gun, but it is going to take some work before it becomes subconscious because I am so accustomed to working the gun higher up. So, more dryfire.
Priority: Performance 